Just a few weeks back, we released the latest version of our iOS app. It took about six months of developing and coding and 895 gallons of that super delicious hot beverage called coffee to complete.

So what would be the fruits of all that backbreaking labor? It still has the look you love, but the biggest game changer here, is the addition of all the Premium features of the web app. That sounds easy enough, but really it wasn’t.

Such Premiumz, many awesome

Developer Sjoerd Tieleman is the brains and brawn behind the new version. He wrote the code and did all the programming legwork. “The biggest challenge was finding the right form for the Premium features. You have limited space to work with and of course users need to be able to find and use all those features.”

Sjoerd is also co-founder & product developer at Hiro, a multi-platform product design and consultancy company. They’ve worked on a truckload of projects for a whole range of companies, but we consider them our personal app wizards and development partners in crime. In fact, we share our office with them and they made our app from scratch.

Sjoerd Tieleman, Co-founder and product developer at Hiro

A little makeover

Even though the 2.0 version is jam packed with cool new features, you won’t be able to edit chords just yet. “We have to prioritize of course”, Sjoerd explains. “And adding those Premium features was the biggest priority. When you have a Premium subscription, you want to have premium features on both the web app and the iOS app.”

The transpose feature also got a little makeover. “I’m actually pretty proud of that one, because the difference between using a capo and transposing was not always very clear. So in order to improve that feature, we really had to put it under a magnifying glass.”

As for making sure all the data is merged, like your library and our song catalogue, that was a joint effort, according to Sjoerd. “Tijmen wrote an API to make sure the whole process goes smoothly and everything syncs the way it’s supposed to.”

Something Android comes this way

So there’s iOS, but what about Android? “We’re working hard on that one too and hopefully, we’ll be able to release it this year”, Sjoerd says. “It’s still a little early to give an exact date, but initially, it will be a lot like the first iOS version we released. That means Android users will have an app that looks great and is easy to use. But just like in the first version of the iOS app, you won’t be able to use the Premium features just yet.